TBH sounds like the same complaints people could've made about home computer kits in the late 1970's. Give this technology 20-30 years and it will be smooth, shiny and work out of the box - providing it isn't killed by the content holders.
"A couple of billion" is about 1/7th of NASAs yearly budget. That isn't going to send you to Mars. What you would need to do is get a hundred billionaires in a room and have them throw away half their personal worth on a Mars shot. Not likely.
But he didn't get to be Warren Buffer by throwing money at things that didn't make a profit. Economic power selects strongly for sociopathic individuals.
Someones got a bit overexcited about the unmanned test of a Dragon capsule. Its pure fantasy to imagine that a few tinkerings by SpaceX and Virgin Galactic amount to the Invisible Hand conquering space any time soon.
If you seriously want to exit Earth, you need to starting thinking about how to restructure society to look beyond the quarterly report.
Reading the articles reporting on this sad event, I learned the Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish. I know everyone is assuming a Tea Party motivated attack, but there is a possibility of it being an anti-semitic attack. There is also the possibility that both of these are correct, as they do not appear to be mutually exclusive.
Could you give us a little more details about your life under the USSR? Where did you live, and when were you born? I'm always interested to hear from people who lived behind the Iron Curtain as the story you get here in the UK is generally just broad-strokes cold war soundbites.
Also, if you wouldn't mind:
1. What year did you start to personally notice big shortages in consumer goods?
2. Do you believe the USSR economy would've been viable with better planning?
3. What is your opinion of Gorbachev and his reforms? What did you think at the time?
The conclusions of the IPCC report had been provisional for thirty years. Just because the conclusions clearly do not fit with your personal ideology, does not mean you can dismiss them and expect to be taken seriously. The scientific method may, in some rare cases, be inaccurate - but the notion that some random climate change denialist on an internet forum can second guess the academic consensus and the peer reviewed literature is laughable arrogance on your part.
Physical economy has hard limits, but using financial instruments and bubbles to pretend those limits don't exist or can be indefinitely postponed is ridiculous.
There were two parts to what I said. Extracting resources can be done on a scale within the energy budget of the planet and using recycling to maintain a steady state - although at some point we are going to have to look outside Earth, but we aren't quite there yet. Utilising them can be made progressively more efficient thus giving us more 'stuff' for our megajoule. What you've said about CHON based technologies would fall under this category.
Supposedly, the abstract part of our capitalist economies makes things more efficient too - but economists define efficiency not in physical terms but basically in terms of how much crap you can externalise. If you honestly believe the abstract economy improves the efficiency of the physical one, please show your working!
I had already read the article having found it through PZ Myers. A lot of people like to rip on the scientific method, but few of them consider how slight the chance is that they or anyone else can successfully second-guess it.
Just goes to show the absurdity of IP law really. Those treaties are nothing but toilet paper if China can disregard them so easily without consequences. IP as currently envisioned basically doesn't work; it attracts rent-seekers like a flame attracts moths, and it can't be enforced on individuals (explosion of piracy) nor on nations who get no benefit from it (China).
Nobody can expect the Chinese government to go against its own national interest (and although its not a democratic government, in this case the interests of the CCP line up fairly well with their people - both want the most rapid economic development possible).
You can no more build an economy on vastly inflated claims of invention than you can build one on endlessly increasing house prices. Economies are build by extracting resources from nature and shaping them into goods and services that improve our quality of life. Anything that does not fall directly under that description should be treated with extreme skepticism.
It is a different situation; China has natural resources where as Japan does not to any big extent. China still has plenty of growth potential on its current track, because of the huge areas of the country that are still greatly underdeveloped. I consider it unlikely that a property boom is an existential threat to the current regime; unlike western nations (my country the UK being a perfect example) they aren't hanging their entire economy on house prices. They still *make* things and utilise physical resources.
My mistake. Seems the main reason was exhaust velocity. However, I do recall reading about the combustion chamber issue, so even with a difference of 160K it might have been an issue.
OK, so lets take a hypothetical situation where housing is a completely free housing market, no zoning, no building codes. Lets call this hypothetical place 'Port-Au-Prince' and then lets see what happens when it gets struck by an earthquake...
Because the government is doing something in most situations, locations and times, it can be blamed for a great deal just by having a finger in whatever is going wrong at a particular time. Government can be bad of course, but its mere presence somewhere is not in itself evidence of it causing problems. Try to be more discerning.
I notice you suddenly started talking about US hunger, even though I said world hunger (which kills about 25,000 people a day, most of them children). Even so, whilst there is no mass death by starvation in the US there is almost certainly a shocking level of malnutrition for such a wealthy nation (yes, this is perfectly consistent with having an obesity epidemic biased towards the poor).
...a market for electricity will ensure nobody goes without electricity, presumably by the same process by which a housing market ensures nobody is homeless and an international food market has caused an end to world hunger.
The ideologues are back with a vengeance. After all that has happened, after the finance system collapsed (and showed that it wasn't really made of anything substantial in the first place) how can anyone still listen to market fundamentalists?
I never said specific impulse was the only choice. And if people thought they could handle Li-F-LH2 tripropellant they would, but nobody can so they don't. Not at all inconsistent with what I said.
Not sure that was the intention actually; the main reason was that 1940s engineering couldn't build a combustion chamber that could withstand the heat of reaction between pure alcohol and LOx, and diluting the alcohol lowered the temperature (The actual chamber they used on the V2 was a massive, seat-of-the-pants, fudge anyhow). Lowering the carbon content of the fuel will have improved Isp certainly, but I don't believe that is why they made the choice.
I don't think that would help. The component of molecular motion perpendicular to axis of the rocket is fairly efficiently converted into momentum parallel to the axis by interaction with the nozzle. There is an 'escape cone' of molecules that don't have enough parallel momentum to actually leave the chamber at all, but they would scatter quickly into part of the momentum space that lets them.
And none of those other fuels has better performance that H2/O2, so whats your point?
The are three reasons why other fuels get used at all:
1. Lack of technology to handle liquid hydrogen
2. Need for a rocket (or more usually a missile) to loiter
3. Additional acceleration during the launch phase
1 and 2 don't apply any more to new rocket development, since even Russia and China can now handle LH2 and have stopped directly deriving their launchers from missiles. With 3 chamber pressure and temperature are again limiting factors and thus some new super-compound with massive energy density doesn't help. There is a reason they don't use TNT as rocket fuel, you know.
Oh, sorry, you were just making an inane nitpick. I thought for a second you might actually know what you are talking about, but then again this is/.
By the rocket equation, mass fraction is determined by velocity and exhaust velocity is driven two things; the mass of the molecules being put out and the pressure/temperature of the combustion chamber. The latter is limited, as once you get to about 100 atmospheres and 3000K you start to run out of materials to make the combustion chamber out of. Thus, molecule mass is the real driving factor - which is why despite the truly horrific engineering problems it entails, liquid hydrogen is a highly valued rocket fuel.
In fact, because molecular mass is so important, H2/O2 rockets are run fuel rich, sacrificing some combustion efficiency in order to leave some unburned hydrogen in the exhaust and reduce its average molecular mass.
So it doesn't matter how much energy you can get out of this new compound. It will only spit out oxygen, nitrogen and nitrous oxides, all far more massive than the hydrogen and water vapour you get from rockets in use at the moment. Sure, breaking down this molecule in optimal conditions might yield enough energy that the reaction products would have more velocity than the exhaust of a H2/O2 rocket, but there is a reason chemists don't build rockets; these researchers aren't taking into account the kind of unobtanium combustion chamber walls you would need to utilise such an inferno.
However, the difficulties you are describing with these machines are comparable to those difficulties found with early computers. First, the technology is big, expensive, and thus confined to large institutions. It gets smaller and less fiddly over time, until the point where the committed amateur can do it in their shed. Maybe give it 20 years or so and some form of rapid manufacture will make it into the home.
From yours and other comments, I think we are in the 1970s equivalent
Go right ahead and used publicly funded R&D, but don't then turn around and say that you've proven the corporate sector cheaper than the public sector and other neo-liberal bullshit.
I'm always skeptical of 'free market genius' because of externalities. A government agency, in a functioning democracy, has to account for itself pretty tightly, and the entire society its in are counted as stakeholders. A private corporation only really answers to its shareholders and can dump off its costs elsewhere.
In the case of SpaceX, the big externality is R&D cost. I find it amusing they boast of both being privately funded, whilst at the same time making a big deal of the super-reliable pintle injectors they sponged off the Apollo programme.
Oh, and the reason you can't copy and paste is likely because Windows 7 is shite:)
Beat me to the punch. Lots of people mix up the EU and the ESA, same as the mix up the EU and the Eurozone.
What NASA, ESA and USSR/Russia have done that SpaceX thus far hasn't is automated docking. That's not a trivial step at all (the Chinese, for instance, haven't done it yet, and are taking their sweet time making sure they get it right). Presumably they've got plans in this regard if they want to resupply the ISS.
As impressive as it is, really these days its a question of time and money, and having a fair decent pool of engineering competence. Likely ESA would've moved on from the ATV to the ARV and then to a manned capsule if the UK stop being dickish about manned spaceflight and matched the French/German level of voluntary contributions. Its not a matter of SpaceX having some free-market spark of genius that enabled this, its a matter that they were lucky enough to be given the funds to make this happen. The question to ask then, is why isn't there more money out there for more groups to push for space capsules?
By 'alarmists' you mean 'the vast majority of respected scientists on the planet'.
Oh, and what you are engaging in is static analysis (even if the numbers you quote are correct, which I sincerely doubt). Its utterly worthless, as are your words.
1. The reporting rag, The Register, has a minor infestation of deniers, and is a fairly low brow online tabloid, so ignore the article and focus on the paper itself.
2. Some simple maths. First scientists estimate was +2C, first denier estimate was +0C (or negative change in some cases). This paper makes the case for a +1.6C change over sea and a +1.3C change over land, so the scientists were clearly more right than the deniers in the first place
3. This is only one paper. Lets wait to see how this plays out in the literature before deciding this has rocked the field of climate science, please.
4. I will try to access the full paper when I get into university later today, but there is no mention in the abstract of other limiting factors to plant growth. That might make this an optimistic estimate (or more charitably, a lower limit)
Basically, this is just science as usual. Climate change has not been 'debunked', the register is overreacting, and there is no need for anyone to be a complete Dellingpole about this.
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TBH sounds like the same complaints people could've made about home computer kits in the late 1970's. Give this technology 20-30 years and it will be smooth, shiny and work out of the box - providing it isn't killed by the content holders.
"A couple of billion" is about 1/7th of NASAs yearly budget. That isn't going to send you to Mars. What you would need to do is get a hundred billionaires in a room and have them throw away half their personal worth on a Mars shot. Not likely.
But he didn't get to be Warren Buffer by throwing money at things that didn't make a profit. Economic power selects strongly for sociopathic individuals.
Someones got a bit overexcited about the unmanned test of a Dragon capsule. Its pure fantasy to imagine that a few tinkerings by SpaceX and Virgin Galactic amount to the Invisible Hand conquering space any time soon.
If you seriously want to exit Earth, you need to starting thinking about how to restructure society to look beyond the quarterly report.
Reading the articles reporting on this sad event, I learned the Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish. I know everyone is assuming a Tea Party motivated attack, but there is a possibility of it being an anti-semitic attack. There is also the possibility that both of these are correct, as they do not appear to be mutually exclusive.
Could you give us a little more details about your life under the USSR? Where did you live, and when were you born? I'm always interested to hear from people who lived behind the Iron Curtain as the story you get here in the UK is generally just broad-strokes cold war soundbites.
Also, if you wouldn't mind:
1. What year did you start to personally notice big shortages in consumer goods?
2. Do you believe the USSR economy would've been viable with better planning?
3. What is your opinion of Gorbachev and his reforms? What did you think at the time?
The conclusions of the IPCC report had been provisional for thirty years. Just because the conclusions clearly do not fit with your personal ideology, does not mean you can dismiss them and expect to be taken seriously. The scientific method may, in some rare cases, be inaccurate - but the notion that some random climate change denialist on an internet forum can second guess the academic consensus and the peer reviewed literature is laughable arrogance on your part.
Physical economy has hard limits, but using financial instruments and bubbles to pretend those limits don't exist or can be indefinitely postponed is ridiculous.
There were two parts to what I said. Extracting resources can be done on a scale within the energy budget of the planet and using recycling to maintain a steady state - although at some point we are going to have to look outside Earth, but we aren't quite there yet. Utilising them can be made progressively more efficient thus giving us more 'stuff' for our megajoule. What you've said about CHON based technologies would fall under this category.
Supposedly, the abstract part of our capitalist economies makes things more efficient too - but economists define efficiency not in physical terms but basically in terms of how much crap you can externalise. If you honestly believe the abstract economy improves the efficiency of the physical one, please show your working!
I had already read the article having found it through PZ Myers. A lot of people like to rip on the scientific method, but few of them consider how slight the chance is that they or anyone else can successfully second-guess it.
Just goes to show the absurdity of IP law really. Those treaties are nothing but toilet paper if China can disregard them so easily without consequences. IP as currently envisioned basically doesn't work; it attracts rent-seekers like a flame attracts moths, and it can't be enforced on individuals (explosion of piracy) nor on nations who get no benefit from it (China).
Nobody can expect the Chinese government to go against its own national interest (and although its not a democratic government, in this case the interests of the CCP line up fairly well with their people - both want the most rapid economic development possible).
You can no more build an economy on vastly inflated claims of invention than you can build one on endlessly increasing house prices. Economies are build by extracting resources from nature and shaping them into goods and services that improve our quality of life. Anything that does not fall directly under that description should be treated with extreme skepticism.
It is a different situation; China has natural resources where as Japan does not to any big extent. China still has plenty of growth potential on its current track, because of the huge areas of the country that are still greatly underdeveloped. I consider it unlikely that a property boom is an existential threat to the current regime; unlike western nations (my country the UK being a perfect example) they aren't hanging their entire economy on house prices. They still *make* things and utilise physical resources.
My mistake. Seems the main reason was exhaust velocity. However, I do recall reading about the combustion chamber issue, so even with a difference of 160K it might have been an issue.
OK, so lets take a hypothetical situation where housing is a completely free housing market, no zoning, no building codes. Lets call this hypothetical place 'Port-Au-Prince' and then lets see what happens when it gets struck by an earthquake...
Because the government is doing something in most situations, locations and times, it can be blamed for a great deal just by having a finger in whatever is going wrong at a particular time. Government can be bad of course, but its mere presence somewhere is not in itself evidence of it causing problems. Try to be more discerning.
I notice you suddenly started talking about US hunger, even though I said world hunger (which kills about 25,000 people a day, most of them children). Even so, whilst there is no mass death by starvation in the US there is almost certainly a shocking level of malnutrition for such a wealthy nation (yes, this is perfectly consistent with having an obesity epidemic biased towards the poor).
...a market for electricity will ensure nobody goes without electricity, presumably by the same process by which a housing market ensures nobody is homeless and an international food market has caused an end to world hunger.
The ideologues are back with a vengeance. After all that has happened, after the finance system collapsed (and showed that it wasn't really made of anything substantial in the first place) how can anyone still listen to market fundamentalists?
I never said specific impulse was the only choice. And if people thought they could handle Li-F-LH2 tripropellant they would, but nobody can so they don't. Not at all inconsistent with what I said.
Not sure that was the intention actually; the main reason was that 1940s engineering couldn't build a combustion chamber that could withstand the heat of reaction between pure alcohol and LOx, and diluting the alcohol lowered the temperature (The actual chamber they used on the V2 was a massive, seat-of-the-pants, fudge anyhow). Lowering the carbon content of the fuel will have improved Isp certainly, but I don't believe that is why they made the choice.
I don't think that would help. The component of molecular motion perpendicular to axis of the rocket is fairly efficiently converted into momentum parallel to the axis by interaction with the nozzle. There is an 'escape cone' of molecules that don't have enough parallel momentum to actually leave the chamber at all, but they would scatter quickly into part of the momentum space that lets them.
And none of those other fuels has better performance that H2/O2, so whats your point?
The are three reasons why other fuels get used at all:
1. Lack of technology to handle liquid hydrogen
2. Need for a rocket (or more usually a missile) to loiter
3. Additional acceleration during the launch phase
1 and 2 don't apply any more to new rocket development, since even Russia and China can now handle LH2 and have stopped directly deriving their launchers from missiles. With 3 chamber pressure and temperature are again limiting factors and thus some new super-compound with massive energy density doesn't help. There is a reason they don't use TNT as rocket fuel, you know.
Oh, sorry, you were just making an inane nitpick. I thought for a second you might actually know what you are talking about, but then again this is /.
By the rocket equation, mass fraction is determined by velocity and exhaust velocity is driven two things; the mass of the molecules being put out and the pressure/temperature of the combustion chamber. The latter is limited, as once you get to about 100 atmospheres and 3000K you start to run out of materials to make the combustion chamber out of. Thus, molecule mass is the real driving factor - which is why despite the truly horrific engineering problems it entails, liquid hydrogen is a highly valued rocket fuel.
In fact, because molecular mass is so important, H2/O2 rockets are run fuel rich, sacrificing some combustion efficiency in order to leave some unburned hydrogen in the exhaust and reduce its average molecular mass.
So it doesn't matter how much energy you can get out of this new compound. It will only spit out oxygen, nitrogen and nitrous oxides, all far more massive than the hydrogen and water vapour you get from rockets in use at the moment. Sure, breaking down this molecule in optimal conditions might yield enough energy that the reaction products would have more velocity than the exhaust of a H2/O2 rocket, but there is a reason chemists don't build rockets; these researchers aren't taking into account the kind of unobtanium combustion chamber walls you would need to utilise such an inferno.
I'm a scientists not an engineer.
However, the difficulties you are describing with these machines are comparable to those difficulties found with early computers. First, the technology is big, expensive, and thus confined to large institutions. It gets smaller and less fiddly over time, until the point where the committed amateur can do it in their shed. Maybe give it 20 years or so and some form of rapid manufacture will make it into the home.
From yours and other comments, I think we are in the 1970s equivalent
Go right ahead and used publicly funded R&D, but don't then turn around and say that you've proven the corporate sector cheaper than the public sector and other neo-liberal bullshit.
I'm always skeptical of 'free market genius' because of externalities. A government agency, in a functioning democracy, has to account for itself pretty tightly, and the entire society its in are counted as stakeholders. A private corporation only really answers to its shareholders and can dump off its costs elsewhere.
In the case of SpaceX, the big externality is R&D cost. I find it amusing they boast of both being privately funded, whilst at the same time making a big deal of the super-reliable pintle injectors they sponged off the Apollo programme.
Oh, and the reason you can't copy and paste is likely because Windows 7 is shite :)
Beat me to the punch. Lots of people mix up the EU and the ESA, same as the mix up the EU and the Eurozone.
What NASA, ESA and USSR/Russia have done that SpaceX thus far hasn't is automated docking. That's not a trivial step at all (the Chinese, for instance, haven't done it yet, and are taking their sweet time making sure they get it right). Presumably they've got plans in this regard if they want to resupply the ISS.
As impressive as it is, really these days its a question of time and money, and having a fair decent pool of engineering competence. Likely ESA would've moved on from the ATV to the ARV and then to a manned capsule if the UK stop being dickish about manned spaceflight and matched the French/German level of voluntary contributions. Its not a matter of SpaceX having some free-market spark of genius that enabled this, its a matter that they were lucky enough to be given the funds to make this happen. The question to ask then, is why isn't there more money out there for more groups to push for space capsules?
By 'alarmists' you mean 'the vast majority of respected scientists on the planet'.
Oh, and what you are engaging in is static analysis (even if the numbers you quote are correct, which I sincerely doubt). Its utterly worthless, as are your words.
1. The reporting rag, The Register, has a minor infestation of deniers, and is a fairly low brow online tabloid, so ignore the article and focus on the paper itself.
2. Some simple maths. First scientists estimate was +2C, first denier estimate was +0C (or negative change in some cases). This paper makes the case for a +1.6C change over sea and a +1.3C change over land, so the scientists were clearly more right than the deniers in the first place
3. This is only one paper. Lets wait to see how this plays out in the literature before deciding this has rocked the field of climate science, please.
4. I will try to access the full paper when I get into university later today, but there is no mention in the abstract of other limiting factors to plant growth. That might make this an optimistic estimate (or more charitably, a lower limit)
Basically, this is just science as usual. Climate change has not been 'debunked', the register is overreacting, and there is no need for anyone to be a complete Dellingpole about this.